


Spirehouse

by lightningwaltz



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Alternate Universe, movie-verse, weirdly experimental
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-07
Updated: 2012-04-07
Packaged: 2017-11-03 05:37:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/377883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lightningwaltz/pseuds/lightningwaltz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maysilee stands guard over District Twelve. [Written for the Girl On Fire Ficathon]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Spirehouse

**Author's Note:**

> This was written in response to a Hunger Games ficathon. The prompt was that the reason Madge wasn't in the movie was because she was a spirit watching over District Twelve. And, well, this idea popped into my head fully formed.

Maysilee Donner, they call her in the Capitol. True enough, it’s the name she was given at birth, a name sealed with ink and blood in the government’s records. The formality acts as a kind of emotional armor, reminding her that these bloodthirsty men and women do not own her. Not in the ways that counts. 

So she’s Maysilee in the chariot. Maysilee on the interview stage.

Maysilee when she dips darts into poison and murders other Tributes. 

_(Not Maysilee when the birds tear her windpipe. Not Maysilee when Haymitch Abernathy begs her to stay. Not Maysilee to her screaming twin sister at home.)_

 

*  
Because though the Capitol has stolen her adulthood, they haven’t stolen _her_. She’s District Twelve down to some intangible part of her spirit. And it’s to District Twelve she returns when her battered body can no longer contain her soul.

At home names blur and shift and change. Many children acquire nicknames, until they age out of them. 

She will never grow up, and when she settles down into District Twelve for eternity, the wind murmurs the name her mother called her in the cradle: 

Madge, Madge, Madge, Madge. 

*  
She’s soon joined by Haymitch’s family. Every last one of them. His girlfriend, too. 

It’s only for a moment or too, before Madge sends them on. There’s a further world, the country of the dead, a place where … where it must be different than this, or she would prefer oblivion. 

Either way, Madge is not permitted to leave just yet. 

But before her guests go, the Seam girl turns to her: “Damn, I’m fucking _pissed_.”

Madge likes her the bitter edge to her voice. Imagines her and Haymitch laughing at the world together, and her heart breaks for him once again. “I know. Believe me. I know.”

“Eh. Guess it can’t be worse than things in this life?” A hesitation. A curious, but friendly look in those dove grey eyes. “Also thanks for making an alliance with him in the arena. Haymitch likes to go it alone sometimes, even when it’s not the smartest move.” 

Madge doesn’t quite know what to say to that, but the compliment makes her feel a bit like she’s basking in the sun.

Haymitch’s family is further off in the distance. Becoming blurry. (It’s not tears: Madge never cries anymore. She can’t.) 

“Oh well, better run.” 

Madge raises three fingers to her lips, and extends her hand out. The gesture is mirrored by the Seam girl.

Soon all Madge can hear is bird song.

 

*  
Madge is there each time when her best friend meets with a miner from the Seam, their hands lingering over the medicinal plants he brings in from the woods.

Madge is there when that same friend is healing the whipping marks on that same miner’s back. (He proposes during the procedure. She tells him to ask again when he’s not delirious with pain.)

(So he does.) 

Madge is there when Mrs. Everdeen takes her first walk, post-birth, out in the springtime air. In one arm she holds a solemn, grey-eyed baby. It’s the first child born to Madge’s group of friends (though their ranks have been thinned by tragedy.) It seems fitting that Katniss arrives in the world when it’s full of bounty and growing things. It’s an illusory hope, as things so often are in the Districts, but Madge is glad for any child born into joy.

*  
“I wish you hadn’t left.” A self-deprecating sigh.

Sometimes it seems like Madge’s sister can see her. 

Maybe she can. 

Maybe that’s why she sells Madge’s golden mockingjay pin to Greasy Sae. 

And maybe that’s also why she makes certain the widowed Mrs. Everdeen gets the medicine she needs. 

*

It’s another thing she and Haymitch have in common: they both became mentors.

* 

The bombs fall from the sky. Now District Twelve is the entity that cannot contain its soul. Madge thought she was beyond pain, but now feels like all of her limbs are being torn from her body. Her true death felt like a paper cut compared to this.

And then, as quick as a stifled shout, it’s over.

Her sister, her twin sister, is there again. She sees her. She _sees Madge_. 

The world is full of spirits. Replete with mockingjays. They will set the tempo of a new Panem borne from the ashes of war. But now Madge Donner can finally leave her post.


End file.
